Sorry Apple, I’m still not ready to upgrade my iPhone

Last week, in light of Apple’s revised revenue guidance, my TC colleague Ron Miller made a tongue-in-cheek apology for taking so long to upgrade his old iPhone.

He wrote that he had finally bitten the bullet and shelled out to upgrade a more than three-years-old (but still working) iPhone 6 for a shiny new iPhone XR ($750+) — deciding at the last minute to spare his wallet the full $1,000 whack for the top of the range iPhone XS. 

Ergo, even the famous Apple premium only stretches so far.

I bring even less good news for the company. I still can’t bring myself to upgrade my (still working but now heavily creaking on the battery and storage front) iPhone 6S because — and here’s my line — Apple removed the headphone jack. Which is absolutely an affront to usability and choice.

My (petite) ears do not conform to the one-size fits all shape Cupertino uses for its bundled earbuds. So even if the earbuds weren’t low audio quality I still couldn’t use them. Headphones that you have to walk around holding in your ears because otherwise every twist and head turn pops them right back out again are, to put it politely, not very useful.

And, yes, this also applies to wireless AirPods — even if I wanted to give Apple more money to be forever stuck having to charge a pair of headphones before being able to use them, which frankly doesn’t sound very smart to me.

On the earbuds front Apple does not cater to petite people, period. I have to use in-ear headphones, with replaceable rubber caps that come in a range of sizes (typically requiring the tiniest of the bunch). This means a 3.5mm jack, which lets me use my own choice of appropriately sized headphones, is not optional but essential.

A 3.5mm jack also lets me invest in higher audio quality kit, should I choose to.

Apple has other ideas, however. And judging by its own messaging at the time it ditched the headphone jack, it presumably thinks I should bravely ram its earbuds in my undersized ears anyway. Er, no thanks!

Of course I could upgrade and just plug in a dongle to (re)convert the Lightning port into the necessary 3.5mm headphone jack. But that’s yet another dongle tax ($9) I shouldn’t have to pay.

iPhones are a premium product, after all. Having to buy extra accessories that are actually essential to get you back to where you were doesn’t feel like progress. (A better word for these irritating wallet-gougers would be ‘unnecessaries’.)

Add to that there is of course the sheer irritation and hassle of having to remember to have the stupid thing with you whenever you want to use your headphones.

While, for those into Apple aesthetics, dongles are of course 100% pure eyesore.

Also — an extra kicker — the Apple Lighting to 3.5mm converter doesn’t appear to play nice with third party remotes. So your headphones’ physical volume control is probably going to be glitchy… (Just check out all these 1-star reviews.)

I won’t get started on Apple also vanishing the SD card port from the MBA. But the expense and hassle of trying to deal with that SNAFU, following a work laptop upgrade, has put me right off the prospect of ‘courageously’ forgetting about other ports that I really need to use.

Nor am I the only TCer affronted by Apple ditching the headphone jack. My colleague Greg Kumparak wrote in December that he’s still missing the 3.5mm port two years later. “It enabled happy moments and never got in the way,” he lamented of the missing jack.

Safe to say, no one is ever going to bemoan the lack of a dongle like that.

For TC’s Miller, he was finally pushed to upgrade his trusty old iPhone because of bad battery and a glitchy recharge cable.

My own iPhone 6S has also tipped over into bad battery territory. The original battery was replaced in 2017 (after being in a faulty bunch that Apple offered free replacements for). But the other day the phone experienced its first “unexpected shutdown” — and a pop-up informed me Peak Performance Capability had been switched on.

Aka the performance management feature Apple got in some hot water with consumer groups for not being clear enough about previously. So there’s now an option to disable this in iOS settings.

I could also, of course, pay to replace the battery. Which would be a lot cheaper than a new iPhone. Or else — even cheaper — just carry a spare battery pack.

So which is less hassle to remember? A spare battery or a headphone dongle?

At least a battery pack extends the daily longevity of the handset which feels like it’s offering some added utility (with the bonus social feature of being able to offer to juice up friends’ devices on-demand).

I’d certainly much prefer to keep a spare battery pack in my bag when I leave the house than always be trying to remember where on earth I left the dumb headphone dongle.

Ignoring Apple’s customary fraying charger cables (which can just be replaced), the other issue I’m facing with my current iPhone is storage. It’s almost full.

Apple offers cloud storage for a fee (after a small amount of free space). But I could also delete stuff I’m not using and buy an external hard drive for storing iPhone photo content (which is what’s taking up the most space) and offload the data to that.

Then I could wipe the iPhone 6S clean and start again.

Frankly the prospect of a rebooted iPhone 6S, which (battery wobbles aside) otherwise still works fine, is more appealing than paying a premium for an otherwise not so different handset which will, in certain key aspects, be less welcoming and useful to me than the one I already own.

It’s almost the more environmentally friendly choice, of course. And let’s not forget that lots of dongles = lots more unnecessary e-waste. So imposed dongle hell is bad for the planet too.

One size never fits all but when combined with an upwardly inflating Apple premium the Cupertino philosophy is starting to feel increasingly awkward.

While ‘reuse don’t replace’ feels more and more normal.

Apple’s increasingly tricky international trade-offs

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2RcV26o

Apple’s trillion dollar market cap was always a false idol

Let’s face it, we love large numbers. We are obsessed with them, whether it’s Forbes list of wealthiest individuals or tech unicorns, if it’s a big number we can’t get enough. Such is the case with the somehow magical trillion dollar mark that Apple briefly reached last summer. We splashed the headlines and glorified it as though it mattered…but it didn’t.

It was just a number.

Sure it showed the tremendous value of the Apple stock, but it was a moment in time fueled by an overheated stock market, full of sound and fury, but in the end adding up to nothing. Fast forward 4 months and the company has lost more than a third of its stock value. Last week, it lost $75 billion with a B in market cap in a single day. We got a hard lesson in stock market physics — what goes up eventually must come down.

Hard lessons

In that light, the trillion dollar mark was fun, but it didn’t mean much in the end. Ultimately, Apple stock still has value. It may be make a few less billion next quarter than it predicted, but it’s still got plenty of cash on the books, and chances are it will be just fine in the end.

Apple lowers guidance on Q1 results, cites China trade tensions

As long as the US-China trade war rages on and the US economy continues to cool, it’s probably not going to approach that trillion threshold again any time soon. Investor enthusiasm for tech stocks in general has waned considerably since those heady dog days of August.

Just as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos may have a few billion more or less on the books on any given day, it just doesn’t matter all that much. It’s not as though they’re going broke. Just as Apple isn’t going to shut down because it might have a bad (less good) quarter than it was projected to have.

Nobody grows forever, not even Apple. It had to cool off at some point, and if this is cooling off, 87 billion instead of 91 billion, it’s a drop-off that investors should be able to understand and live with. If it became a troubling pattern and an ice age set in, that would be another matter, but Apple is still selling product hand over fist, tens of millions of iPhones is still a lot of iPhones. Wall Street should probably take a chill pill.

Tech stock doldrums

It’s worth noting that Apple has hardly been in alone taking a huge hit on its stock price, especially tech stocks, which have been taking a beating since November on Wall Street. Want to talk a trillion dollars, how about the biggest names in tech losing a trillion (that’s with a T, folks) in value in one stretch in November. When Apple halted trading last week to announce lower than expected revenue, the stock dove even further, as it confirmed the worst fears of investors.

Worse, Chinese consumers have driven iPhone sales just as the Chinese economy has hit a massive speed bump this year. In June, Reuters reported shockingly weak growth. In November, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese economy was slowing down long before the president started a trade war. .

Apple also appears to be having more trouble selling the XR worldwide than it had projected, and fluctuating currency rates are also wreaking havoc — not to mention the trade war — but analyst Horace Dediu from Asymco sees Apple generating strong revenue from non-iPhone hardware, as the chart he shared on Twitter recently shows:

How does Apple’s business look if you exclude the iPhone? pic.twitter.com/bk5xGCQ2oR

— Horace Dediu (@asymco) January 6, 2019

Whatever the future holds for Apple and other tech stocks, we clearly like to throw around large numbers. Yet companies don’t tend to live and die by their market cap. It’s not a metric that matters all that much to anyone, except those of us who like to marvel at the size of the biggest numbers, and then click our tongues when they inevitably fall to earth.

Sorry that I took so long to upgrade, Apple

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2CW7i2r

Apple’s trillion dollar market cap was always a false idol

Let’s face it, we love large numbers. We are obsessed with them, whether it’s Forbes list of wealthiest individuals or tech unicorns, if it’s a big number we can’t get enough. Such is the case with the somehow magical trillion dollar mark that Apple briefly reached last summer. We splashed the headlines and glorified it as though it mattered…but it didn’t.

It was just a number.

Sure it showed the tremendous value of the Apple stock, but it was a moment in time fueled by an overheated stock market, full of sound and fury, but in the end adding up to nothing. Fast forward 4 months and the company has lost more than a third of its stock value. Last week, it lost $75 billion with a B in market cap in a single day. We got a hard lesson in stock market physics — what goes up eventually must come down.

Hard lessons

In that light, the trillion dollar mark was fun, but it didn’t mean much in the end. Ultimately, Apple stock still has value. It may be make a few less billion next quarter than it predicted, but it’s still got plenty of cash on the books, and chances are it will be just fine in the end.

Apple lowers guidance on Q1 results, cites China trade tensions

As long as the US-China trade war rages on and the US economy continues to cool, it’s probably not going to approach that trillion threshold again any time soon. Investor enthusiasm for tech stocks in general has waned considerably since those heady dog days of August.

Just as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or Jeff Bezos may have a few billion more or less on the books on any given day, it just doesn’t matter all that much. It’s not as though they’re going broke. Just as Apple isn’t going to shut down because it might have a bad (less good) quarter than it was projected to have.

Nobody grows forever, not even Apple. It had to cool off at some point, and if this is cooling off, 87 billion instead of 91 billion, it’s a drop-off that investors should be able to understand and live with. If it became a troubling pattern and an ice age set in, that would be another matter, but Apple is still selling product hand over fist, tens of millions of iPhones is still a lot of iPhones. Wall Street should probably take a chill pill.

Tech stock doldrums

It’s worth noting that Apple has hardly been in alone taking a huge hit on its stock price, especially tech stocks, which have been taking a beating since November on Wall Street. Want to talk a trillion dollars, how about the biggest names in tech losing a trillion (that’s with a T, folks) in value in one stretch in November. When Apple halted trading last week to announce lower than expected revenue, the stock dove even further, as it confirmed the worst fears of investors.

Worse, Chinese consumers have driven iPhone sales just as the Chinese economy has hit a massive speed bump this year. In June, Reuters reported shockingly weak growth. In November, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese economy was slowing down long before the president started a trade war. .

Apple also appears to be having more trouble selling the XR worldwide than it had projected, and fluctuating currency rates are also wreaking havoc — not to mention the trade war — but analyst Horace Dediu from Asymco sees Apple generating strong revenue from non-iPhone hardware, as the chart he shared on Twitter recently shows:

How does Apple’s business look if you exclude the iPhone? pic.twitter.com/bk5xGCQ2oR

— Horace Dediu (@asymco) January 6, 2019

Whatever the future holds for Apple and other tech stocks, we clearly like to throw around large numbers. Yet companies don’t tend to live and die by their market cap. It’s not a metric that matters all that much to anyone, except those of us who like to marvel at the size of the biggest numbers, and then click our tongues when they inevitably fall to earth.

Sorry that I took so long to upgrade, Apple

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2CW7i2r

LG is adding Apple AirPlay and HomeKit support to its TVs

There’s a trend here. After Samsung and Vizio, LG is also adding support for Apple’s ecosystem to its TV operating system webOS. Specifically, people who buy an LG TV in 2019 should be able to share content to their TVs using AirPlay 2. TVs will also be compatible with HomeKit, letting you create custom scenarios and control your TV using Siri.

“Many of our customers may also happen to have Apple devices,” Senior Director of Home Entertainment Product Marketing Tim Alessi said during the company’s CES press conference. “LG has been working with Apple as well to create a streamlined user experience. So I’m very pleased to announce today that we’re adding Apple AirPlay to our 2019 TVs.”

If you have an iPhone, iPad or Mac, you can send video content to your TV using the AirPlay icon in your favorite video app. You can also mirror your display in case you want to show some non-video content.

2019 LG TVs also support AirPlay audio, which means that you can send music and podcasts on your TV, pair your TV with other AirPlay 2-compatible speakers.

New LG TVs also support HomeKit. It means that you can add your TV to the Home app on your iOS device and Mac. After that, you can control basic TV features from the Home app. You can also assign Siri keywords so that you can manage your TV using Siri on your iOS device or HomePod.

HomeKit support lets you create custom actions. For instance, you can say “Hey Siri, turn on the TV” and have Siri turn on the TV and dim your Philips Hue lights.

Unlike Samsung, LG didn’t announce an iTunes app. So you can’t rent or buy movies and TV shows straight from your TV. Buying something from your phone and then using AirPlay is still a bit clunky.

LG also said that 2019 TVs come with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support. But this is less surprising as you can find hundreds of devices that support those voice assistants.

Finally, the company is adding a home dashboard to control a wide variety of home devices from your TV. Details are still thin on this feature. It’s unclear whether LG will roll out some of all of these software features to old TVs.

Watching all TV manufacturers add AirPlay and HomeKit support one by one reminds me of the year TV manufacturers all announced native Netflix apps for their TV. It’s clear that Apple is following in Netflix’s footsteps and opening up. Apple has been working on a subscription-based streaming service for months. And the company wants to support as many devices as possible.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2seW1nH

China’s Baidu says its answer to Alexa is now on 200M devices

A Chinese voice assistant has been rapidly gaining ground in recent months. DuerOS, Baidu’s answer to Amazon’s Alexa, reached over 200 million devices, China’s top search engine announced on its Weibo official account last Friday.

To put that number into context, more than 100 million devices pre-installed with Alexa have been sold, Amazon recently said.

Voice interaction technology is part of Baidu’s strategy to reposition itself from a heavy reliance on search businesses towards artificial intelligence. The grand plan took a hit when the world-renown scientist Lu Qi stepped down as Baidu’s chief operating officer, though the segment appears to have scored healthy growth lately, with DuerOS more than doubling from a base of 90 million installs since last June.

When it comes to how many devices actually use DuerOS regularly, the number is much less significant: 35 million machines a month at the time Baidu’s general manager for smart home devices announced the figure last November.

Like Alexa, which has made its way into both Amazon-built Echo speakers and OEMs, DuerOS also takes a platform play to power both Baidu-built and third-party devices.

Interestingly, DuerOS has achieved all that with fewer capabilities and a narrower partnership network than its American counterpart. By the end of 2018, Alexa could perform more than 56,000 skills. Devices from over 4,500 brands can now be controlled with Alexa, says Amazon. By comparison, Baidu’s voice assistant had 800 different skills, its chief architect Zhong Lei revealed at the company’s November event. It was compatible with 85 brands at the time.

This may well imply that DuerOS’s allies include heavy-hitters with outsize user bases. Baidu itself could be one as it owns one of China’s biggest navigation app, which is second to Alibaba’s AutoNavi in terms of number of installs, according to data from iResearch. Baidu said in October that at least 140 million people had activated the voice assistant of its Maps service.

Furthermore, Baidu speakers have managed to crack a previously duopolistic market. A report from Canalys shows that Baidu clocked in a skyrocketing 711 percent quarter-to-quarter growth to become China’s third-biggest vendor of smart speakers during Q3 last year. Top players Alibaba and Xiaomi, on the other hand, both had a sluggish season.

While Baidu deploys DuerOS to get home appliances talking, it has doubled down on smart vehicles with Apollo. The system, which the company calls the Android for autonomous driving, counted 130 OEMs, parts suppliers and other forms of partners as of last October. It’s attracted global automakers Volvo and Ford who want a foothold in China’s self-driving movement. Outside China, Apollo has looked to Microsoft Azure Cloud as it hunts for international partnerships.

Baidu has yet to prove commercial success for its young AI segment, but its conversational data trove holds potential for a lucrative future. Baidu became China’s top advertising business in part by harnessing what people search on its engine. Down the road, its AI-focused incarnation could apply the same data-crunching process to what people say to their machines.

from Android – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2TwUxAR
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Vizio adds Apple AirPlay and HomeKit integrations to its SmartCast smart TV platform

Apple is reportedly gearing up for a new streaming TV service to rival Netflix, Amazon and Google this year, but in the meantime, it is also expanding interoperability with more third parties like smart TV makers to make what it already has available easier to use in the living room.

In the latest development, smart TV maker Vizio today announced at the CES consumer electronics show that it’s adding support for AirPlay 2 and HomeKit to its SmartCast interactive TV platform. The integration will mean that Vizio TV owners can link their other Apple devices up to their TVs to browse and watch content from iTunes, as well as any photos, videos or music on those devices. Then, through HomeKit, they can also control that content and the rest of the TV using Apple’s voice assistant Siri.

Vizio said that the feature will be rolled out first to beta users of the SmartCast 3.0 platform in the U.S. and Canada in Q1 2019. In Q2, it will be rolled out to all SmartCast TV users via a free, over-the-air update to the 3.0 version of the platform.

“At our core, Vizio is committed to delivering value. SmartCast 3.0 is one of the ways we’re doing just that. By adding support for Apple AirPlay 2 and HomeKit, users can play content from their iPhone, iPad and Mac directly to SmartCast TVs, and enable TV controls through the Home app and Siri,” said Bill Baxter, Chief Technology Officer, Vizio, in a statement.

He added that this also will make Vizio the first smart TV brand to offer the ability for consumers to use any major voice assistant — Siri, Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant (the latter two integrations were added previously) — to control their sets. “We’re excited to be the first in the marketplace to support such a wide range of ways for consumers to sit back and enjoy the entertainment they love.” The Google Assistant functionality is also expanding to control more services such as the launching of apps and switching inputs.

The Vizio / Apple news comes just one day after Vizio’s bigger rival Samsung — which has a 33 percent share of the smart TV market in the US compared to Vizio’s 24 percent — also debuted an Apple AirPlay integration, along with a new tab directly linking to iTunes in Samsung’s interactive platform.

The iTunes app is an exclusive to Samsung for the time being, but the Vizio deal lays the groundwork for more collaboration between Vizio and Apple ahead. Vizio, notably, is not a direct competitor to Apple in other business areas in the way that Samsung is.

For Vizio, this is a significant step ahead for the company at a time when it is playing some catchup against Samsung, which once trailed Vizio but gradually overtook it as the leading smart TV player. I’d argue that Vizio is also still recuperating from its no-good, very bad 2017.

Its series of unfortunate events included a failed $2 billion acquisition of the company by Chinese maker LeEco after LeEco itself fell apart; a lawsuit against LeEco over that deal breaking down; another lawsuit, this time from the FTC (settled for $2.2 million) over snooping on its customers’ viewing habits; and a third suit brought by AMD, this time over graphics patent infringement, which AMD has since won.

This is actually the first time that Vizio has been at CES in years, which is also saying something. The company is also using the event to announce its newest range of 4K HDR smart TVs and audio equipment, including sound bars and subwoofers.

On the side of Apple, taken together, the two integrations with Vizio and Samsung underscore Apple’s challenges and ambitions at the moment.

The company last week warned the market that sales of its iPhone smartphone — for years now the company’s undisputed growth engine — would be falling short of expectations for a number of reasons. (They included worse-than-expected sales in China, where price and feature competition is fierce; a global slowdown in phone sales as the market saturates; and weaker demand for its new, expensive models.

Apple, as you know, has over the years been building up a services model to complement its hardware business — with apps, music, video, cloud services and more — and many believe that the company will start to focus on that even more to offset slowdowns in its hardware sales, as well as to boost the sales of that hardware. (Hence the rumors of a Netflix-style OTT video service.)

It’s an opportunity for sure, but not a guaranteed win. Apple TV — the company’s existing bridge to content on televisions — hasn’t managed to overtake the collective popularity of other smaller middleware like Google’s Chromecast and Amazon’s Fire TV and Fire stick. And the OTT market is very crowded already, with offerings from all of the above, pay-TV providers, smart TV makers and more.

Given all of the above, it will be worth watching to see who else might have Apple-related news this week and if a kinder, more device-agnostic Apple-as-services provider emerges as a theme at CES this week.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2LTbK55

Apple shows off new smart home products from HomeKit partners

Apple recently invited reporters to meet a handful of companies announcing new products at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. The common theme: All of these products connect to Apple’s HomeKit platform for smart home devices.

By integrating with HomeKit, these companies make their products configurable and controllable via Apple devices, specifically through the Home app and Siri. Last year, Apple rolled out a new software authentication system, which meant that manufacturers no longer needed to include an MFi chipset to be part of the program.

This isn’t a comprehensive list of all the HomeKit-integrated products that will be announced at CES, but it provides a snapshot of what’s coming to the ecosystem in 2019 — smart light switches, door cameras, electrical outlets and more. Here they are:

• New Wemo Light Switches (pictured above) from Belkin that start at $39.99. They allow you to control your lights with Siri or the Home App, and are planned for release in spring or summer of this year.
• A smart light strip and a smart power strip from Eve, a company focused on HomeKit-integrated accessories.
• A new smart outlet from ConnectSense, allowing customers to monitor the power consumption of each outlet. Unlike the company’s existing Smart Outlet² (which fits over existing outlets), the In-Wall SmartOutlet is — as the name implies — actually installed in your wall. It’s scheduled for release in the first half of 2019.
• Kwikset is expanding its Premis lineup of touchscreen smart locks with a new model that it describes as offering a more contemporary and sleek look.
• Mighton plans to launch its Avia smart lock in May. Beyond their more high-tech functions, Avia products are also supposed to be particularly secure locks, and are by the UK police’s Secured by Design initiative.
• The Nanoleaf Canvas is a modular smart lighting system that can create fun, beautiful patterns and even respond to music. A Nanoleaf Starter Kit costs $248.
• Netatmo is announcing a Smart Video Doorbell allowing customers to see, on their phone, who’s ringing the doorbell. It’s also announcing a Smart Indoor Air Quality Monitor that measures air quality, humidity level, temperature and noise.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Rds8TY